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EVANGELISM

An Address on
Permanence and
Change in Church
and Mission

BY

WILLIAM ERNEST HOCKING

u

Second Printing
1936

COPYRIGHTED 1935

BY
W. E. HOCKING

UNIVERSITY /'/
V^ OF CHICAGO //
LIBRARY

A MOVEMENT FOR WORLD CHRISTIANITY

140 South Dearborn Street

Chicago, 111.

FOREWORD TO SECOND PRINTING

The continuing demand for copies of Dr.
Hocking's address on Evangelism is an in-
dication of the critical importance attached to
it by an increasing number of men and women
in the churches.

The Executive Committee of A MOVE-
MENT FOR WORLD CHRISTIANITY is the
happier to make this presentation to the
public since the address, delivered at the
meeting held in Rochester in May, 1935, of
which the Movement was the direct outcome,
had no small share in consolidating the pur-
pose of those present and so in launching the
Movement itself.

We send this booklet out in the conviction
that the Gospel of Christ, rightly interpreted,
is the hope of the world. We are today catch-
ing a new vision of the largeness of that Gos-
pel, of its ability to save from every type of
"lostness" to use Dr. Hocking's word. We
believe that the interpretation of Evangelism
given in this address will bring new insight
to missionaries of alert and contemporaneous
minds and new enthusiasm to those who sup-
port them.

Douglas H or ton.

FOREWORD

The address that follows is of too great sig-
nificance and value to be limited to the constitu-
ency of a single movement within the Christian
Church. It offers a profound insight into the inter-
relationship of permanence and change in the con-
tent and form of the Christian message to the
world. It gives spiritual intensity and comprehen-
siveness to that greater evangelism that must
inform the mission of the Church at home and
abroad. It is in itself a noble effort to illustrate
the way in which the Church as a whole must, from
time to time, envelope any single projection of its
life like the Foreign Mission, in order that the
part may be reinformed by the fresh meaning that
has entered into the conception of the world mis-
sion of the Church as a whole.

The occasion on which this address was given
was the first annual meeting of the National Com-
mittee of the Modern Missions Movement, in
May 1935, to which had been invited as partici-
pants in the deliberations, representatives of the
Foreign Missions Boards of the various commun-
ions, missionaries from the world field, Commis-
sioners of the original Laymen's Foreign Missions
Inquiry, and a strong group of younger church-

men, in significant places of leadership in the
churches and college life of the nation. The critical
questions to be decided were, whether there is a
necessary function for such a movement to per-
form in the Church at home and abroad, and, if
so, what should be its purposes and method. It
was inevitable that one of the principal addresses
should be given by one who, both in the original
Report and since, has made such a profound con-
tribution to the clarification of the issues that con-
front the Church and Mission in our time.

This address will therefore, we trust, give
some deeper understanding of the spirit that in-
forms this Movement, that includes many va-
rieties and diversities of the one Christian faith
and purpose j and some adumbration of the larger
service which it is now attempting to implement in
ways that will shortly be announced. Some of the
other addresses that will be published later, will
further illustrate the fact that the churches of the
non-Roman tradition have at their service, no less
than the older Church, those "winged minds",
who can bring to them the firmness of vision, the
depth of sympathy, the strength of insight, the
profound concern and spiritual passion, which are
the living channels of the Spirit's guidance, and
by which the Church is continually renewed, and
made competent and able for its supreme mission
in and to the world.

Ernest Graham Guthrie.

EVANGELISM

I was asked to speak to you about foreign mis-
sions, what is changing and what is permanent
about them.* I am not departing from that theme
if I choose to speak about 'evangelism'} for evan-
gelism is the essential work of both church and
mission. And that is where our real concern lies
when we talk about change and about the 'modern
mission': have we any different conception of 'the
gospel', or of its fitness for other lands, or of the
mission as a way of spreading it?

Since evangelism is the center of the matter,
I propose to speak to you this evening in the
language of theology. There is no need in this
company either to avoid it, or to explain it. It is
a language which has history in it} and for that
reason it carries those continuities of meaning
which we especially need to remember when we
are thinking of change.

There are three remarks which I would like
to make upon this theme. Let me first briefly
mention them, and then enlarge on one or two of
them.

*An address delivered at Rochester, New York on May 28,
1935, before a convention called by the Modern Missions Move-
ment.

First: The obligation to 'preach rests y not on any
'part of the Churchy but on the whole Church.

There is no one, cleric or lay, official or un-
official, who is exempt from this duty, or who can
transfer it to any delegate to his minister, to his
missionary, to his board.

Second: The -parish of all 'preaching is the
world.

The condition of the world is the obligation of
the church, and that means the whole world. If
Christianity should begin to appear as a local
religion, let us say a religion for Europe and
America, it would automatically cease to be the
religion of Europe and America. For the moment
we begin to think of it as a special cult of our own
we have ceased to be Christians.

The mind of man is naturally religious: so much
psychology and sociology today are inclined to
assert. The religious trait is universal. But if
Tertullian is right, the mind of man is also natur-
ally Christian} in its religious journey it cannot
come to rest short of that goal. Unless we believe
this to be the case, we are ourselves sitting loose
from our own profession. For our religion is by
definition that attitude toward the world which
we hold valid for all men. Hence nothing less
than c the world' can be the object of any live
church or of any live Christian.

The third point is: The preaching of Christ is
also a learning of Christ, the two go together.

It is natural to suppose that we first finish our
learning and then proclaim our message. This is
an error. There is a half truth in it. No one can
have any motive to preach unless he has something
to say of which he is convinced. But the effort to
express is an element in continuing to learn: the
best learning one does is in trying to teach. It was
so with the disciples j it remains so.

It is for this reason that we have not first to fin-
ish up with America before going to Asia. If what
we have to preach is completely finished in our
minds, we would better keep hammering away at
home until we make some impression. But if the
effort to preach Christ in Asia is also a way of
learning what we have to say, it may well be that
we shall find in Asia some things which will make
our preaching in America more pertinent and ef-
fective. I think this is the case; our experience in
Asia will add much to our conception of Chris-
tianity.

This bears on our relation to other religions.
We certainly have something to give; otherwise
we have no right whatever to appear as preachers.
But in attempting to convey that something, we are
not dealing with minds empty of faith and of a
vision of Godj there will be a mutuality of giving.
If we deal with their best minds, we shall have to

become very clear about the nature o the treasure
we offer. Hence our relation to these other reli-
gions cannot be one of immediate displacement, as
if, for example we wished Buddhism at our ap-
proach to throw up its hands and disappear. Budd-
hism through centuries longer than our own era
has done much to sustain the slumbering fires of
the Spirit in that vast continent j and until we have
a deep understanding of how it has done this, we
shall not know the soul of Asia, which is a great
part of the soul of man. The test of a religion lies
in its power to interpret. Men will adhere to that
religion which most profoundly interprets what
their hearts have felt j the ultimate religion will be
that one which comprehends all that other re-
ligions have seen, and more beside.

Hence the relation of Christianity to the non-
Christian religions must be that of an experiment
m interpretation. We cannot sit down, here in
America, and decide in advance what the final rela-
tion of Christianity to Buddhism is to be. But we
do see things we can help ; and we can conceive the
attitude of Christ toward the mind of man in
every place and under every type of faith in these
terms. "You are seeking for something or some-
one whom you haven't yet found, I that speak
unto thee am He". It is the power to interpret the
human heart which will decide that heart's power
to recognize and assent. This is the great respon-
sibility of the mission; and it is because of this that

evangelism abroad may be our best way of learn-
ing of Christ.

With these three remarks before us, let us con-
sider the fundamental motive of evangelism every-
where, namely, the lostness of the world and its
salvation, for these terms, theological as they
are, are quite as pertinent to the situation of the
human race today as they have ever been.

I. THE LOSTNESS OF THE WORLD.

Compassion for lost men has been the motive of
all the great renewers of religion, as it was the
motive of Jesus himself. If we say that men are
lost when they are without a guide, without cer-
tainty, without an inner peace, without a sure direc-
tion of action, then that motive has lost none of
its force during the years. One might venture to
say that there is more lostness in the world, more
widespread and deliberate lostness than ever be-
fore. 1

On the face of it, this judgment looks like a con-
fession of failure, not alone of progress but of
Christianity itself. If, in face of all the evangel-
ism of nineteen centuries, the world reverts to a
condition of lostness which resembles nothing so
much as that of the Roman Empire it might well
seem that all religions, together with the easy

x lt is in a political journal, in a review of a political book,
that I find the phrase : "The greatest blow to mankind is its loss
of the idea of God, which (loss has) cut men off from trans-
cendental relations." The reviewer quotes the author, Werner
Sombart, as follows :

"The life of mankind has become meaningless. Cut off from
transcendental relations, cut off from directive ideals, man has
recoiled into himself, has sought there the realization of his
ideas, and found it not ... In all his struggles to find the
meaning of life, he is continually met with an iron breath of
senselessness which drives him into silence and cold."

hopefulness of a liberal evolutionism, might be
called on to declare bankruptcy. I do not accept
this judgment. "Progress" has not failed, neither
has Christianity failed.

"Progress" has not failed. Enlightenment is a
fact. The sciences do move forward. The arts
move with them. They know how to retain their
gains j the loss of knowledge and technique has be-
come almost unthinkable j accumulation is auto-
matic. Social life is cushioned by this movement}
goods are multiplied, and the evils of life will
continually be traced to their causes and one by
one be eliminated.

"Progress" is real enough j it is simply that
social progress is not moral or religious progress.
The evolutionists were inclined to rely on an in-
evitable march toward social improvement} 'salva-
tion' was to be translated as the gradual result of
moral development, the increase of sympathy, the
substitution of co-operation for strife. This result
has not taken place. The growth of science and of
technique have brought, instead, simply greater
powers for whatever ends men wish to pursue:
neither science nor technique carry any instruction
about those ends. They make no one wise about
values. They are very likely to bring absorption
in themselves, bedazzlement with the partial
knowledge and achievement they bring, and be-
wilderment because those partial gains do not
satisfy.

Hence progress does not carry with it religious
progress. It means rather that men have found
new ways of being lost. For progress invites reli-
ance on inferior gods. The scientific are in danger
of becoming superstitious about the automatic push-
forward which they ascribe to 'Nature' j or about
human prowess, aided by power over nature. The
powers they celebrate are real powers. But power
is morally neutral. The soul is not committed to
goodness by its possession. To regard it as the
end is the essence of irreligion.

Thus the older personal polytheisms are re-
placed by a newer impersonal 'polytheism; each
science and each art presents itself as a saving
power, and gains its multitudes of adherents who
do not see that this power is subject to an ultimate
condition. They become the rational idolaters of
the modern age.

This is why the progress of civilization, instead
of dispensing with religion, increases the need of it.

The "heathen heart" is not alone the heart that
bows down to idols that abound in the temples of
India and China j it is the heart which "puts its
trust in reeking tube and iron shard".

In our own world, it is not alone the Bushmen
and the Untouchables who are lost: it is the intel-
ligent and the wealthy, the bourgeois and the pro-
letariat-in-power, the governing as well as the gov-

10

erned, the institutions, the homes, the schools and
universities. They are more prone to self satisfac-
tion and false finalities than are the simple of the
earth; it is still harder for them to be saved than
for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

Hence it is to them as well as to the poor in
spirit that our compassion must go out. If we are
indeed to pray for the salvation of the world, we
must not address ourselves alone to those who are
easiest to help. It is the true instinct of the great
preacher that leads him to Corinth, to Athens, and
then to Rome.

I fear that we must say of the preaching of our
time especially in the mission field that it has
evaded its hardest problems j it has addressed the
multitudes, the poor and the outcast, as it should
have done; but it has avoided the scribes and
pharisees, as it should not have done. To this
extent it has been unworthy of its Master. It has
shirked the labor of thought. It has not sought to
save the world but only a fragment of the world.

It is not progress' that has failed. Is the lost-
ness of the world, then a failure of Christianity?

Christianity has not failed.

In the first place, lostness belongs to the con-
scious self, and underneath this surface there is a
vast deal of habit and motive whose religious
sources belong to history and cannot be ex-

11

punged. O the lost millions of our time, the very
science as well as much of the social order has
Christianity for one of its parents. The Russians
who have ceased to profess Christianity have not
overcome the momentum of centuries of training j
under their skins they remain Christians in effect.

In the second place, we set up false expectations
when we conceive as our goal a world so far saved
that it cannot be lost again. There is no warrant
for any such expectation, either in the Gospels
or in the history of mankind. We cannot banish the
freedom of the will. Nor can we suppress the ex-
perimental trait which leads the human mind to
devise new ways of thought and life, most of
which are wrong and therefore short-lived. A new
stage of thought is a new point of departure, from
which men will try in new ways the rejection of
the good. They are new modes of lostnessj but
they are also new requirements on our understand-
ing of our own faith.

Thus, the challenge to belief in God offered by
Russia today is a deeper challenge than that of
the older atheism. It is an experimental atheism,
not merely a personal negation. It is a national
atheism, carrying itself out consistently, or trying
to, into all institutions. It is an atheism flanked by
a powerful social philosophy and carried on a wave
of responsible passion for mankind. If we are to
meet it, we must get hold of our own truth at a
deeper level.

12

Hence, the phenomenon of lostness has a func-
tion to perform in the growth of faith itself. So
far from being a failure of Christianity, it is, for
the Christian, an agency in the deepening of his
religious respiration. It can be regarded as a phase
of the work of the Holy Spirit in leading us into
further regions of truth.

This leads to a comment on one of our bad
habits in thinking of the motives of evangelism.
We tend to assume that it promotes evangelism to
grow desperate about the state of the world. If we
no longer listen to the ticks of the clock, as has
been done in the memory of persons in this room,
and count the souls slipping into perdition with
these time-beats, we still grow panic-stricken in
view of the advance of anti-religious movements,
of communism, of threats of war, of the various
ways in which our civilization may collapse j and
use these fears to fan the fervor of evangelism.
But evangelism does not require impending catas-
trophe to give it urgency. Nor can it be conducted
in an atmosphere of panic, which is an atmosphere
not of faith but of lack of faith. Concern, ardor,
compassion are true motives of evangelism j fear is
treasonable, for it is inconsistent with what Chris-
tianity must offer men, serenity, stability, peace,
based on certitude in the midst of whatever heav-
ings of the world. The Christian needs perpet-
ually to be stirred out of sloth by the reminder

13

that the miseries of a lost world are his personal
responsibility j but the alarmist has already ceased
to be a Christian.

II. CONTINUITY AND CHANGE.

The lost world is a world in need of new truth.
But whenever one speaks of new truth, there is dis-
tress in some quarters, and an arousing of the
protective spirit of loyalty toward what is old and
permanent.

Here it is particularly important to discern
where the real issues lie. For it is one of the trage-
dies of Christian history and one from which the
history of this movement is not free that misun-
derstandings may be created by unreal issues.
Whatever the differences between the trends
called conservative and liberal in theology, there
is no point in making an issue between continuity
and change, between the new and the old. It is
like making an issue between food and drink.
There is an old saying which states with much
accuracy the position of the preacher on this point :

"Every scribe which is instructed unto
the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a
man that is an householder, which bring-
eth forth out of his treasure things new
and old." 1

From the point of view of this very clear hint,
there are two ways of failing to meet any situation

x Matt. xiii, 52.

IS

that confronts our evangelism one is to draw out
of our treasure only the old things, the other to
draw out only the new things.

In view of the ease of our misunderstanding on
this point you will perhaps bear with me if I say
some very simple and commonplace things j for it
is just these things, matters of plain common sense,
which in our search for subtleties, we are likely to
overlook. And besides, we have a way of driving
each other to extremes. There are some who want
no change at all, merely because there are others
who would change everything. And there are
those who reject any continuity, and want to
change everything simply because there are others
who admit no change at all.

Let me then say a word first of all to those who
fear any change though I doubt whether there
are any such present!

Your central position is just. It is the whole
point of religion to bring a man into the presence
of what is eternal, unchanging. Were this not the
case, religion would not be what it is, a refuge and
relief from the shifting foundations of the flux all
around us. There are such things as persistent
religious problems, the problems which spring out
of the moral life of man, his sin, his suffering, his
ignorance, his transiency: these problems are the
same from age to age. And when the true answer

16

to these problems is found, it remains a true an-
swer. I Christianity contains true answers to these
problems, or to any of them 3 the passage of time
is not going to render these answers false.

But these problems, we have to remember, are
the problems of actual human beings ; hence they
always arise in a context, the context of those per-
sonal lives. In a sense, there is no such thing as
"the problem of sin"; it is always my individual
problem of my individual sin. Hence if the preach-
er is to speak to the problems that exist, he has to
follow that contemporary road; he has to find the
man where he lives and when he lives. Otherwise
his message is insulated; he fails to equip his con-
vert with the mental means of living his concrete
life in his own community.

Jesus had one unchanging truth to convey. Yet
never in our records does he repeat himself; he
never gave twice the same prescription. He fol-
lowed the method of the wise physician, who
knows that each disease is the disease of an indi-
vidual patient, and that there is no standard
remedy to fit all cases. He knew, as a wise teacher
knows, that truth cannot be inserted into a mind;
it can only be received there as an answer to a ques-
tion which that mind has formed for itself. It
must be grown, and that means that its stem will
have historic roots. Hence change, even in preach-
ing, is the very condition of life.

17

Few things have changed so much in the course
of history as have Christian missions. Our missions
are not the missions of Paul, they are not the mis-
sions of the middle ages, they are not the missions
of the sixteenth century. They are a new set of
missions, they are only one hundred and fifty
years old. Paul's was not a foreign mission in our
sense, it moved within the Empire; it was not
backed up by any board. He did not even settle
down for good, to stay where he preached. He
left the scene and moved on, and expected the
church to take care of itself with the aid of a few
pastoral letters.

I will not take time this evening to detail the
respects in which the oriental mind has changed its
questions since our missions started, nor the Afri-
can mind, nor the South American mind. It is ob-
vious that people everywhere are facing religion
with different presuppositions, with different ques-
tions, as the line between human knowledge and
human ignorance, doubt, perplexity, takes new con-
tours. The present questions come out of a differ-
ent mental history and out of different tempers.
One hundred and fifty years ago the oriental was
ready to assume that there is a religion of authori-
tative origin, and that his only problem was to find
the right authority. He was ready to decide this
authority largely on the basis of the strong per-
sonal impression made by the great preachers

18

coming out of an unknown western land. Today,
the oriental in touch with school or city life is not
ready at once to consider any authority. He has
been touched by the temper of human self-help
through science and through government. He is
more than half alienated from any gods at all, un-
less they can make common cause with these
human agencies. Further, he knows vastly more
about us than he did, and what he knows does not
make the task of the preacher easier. The man of
God is still the man of God; but his words will be
interpreted by the whole of our civilization. The
obvious innocence of the missionary was once a
protection against resentments stirred up by com-
merce and diplomacy; but now that same absence
of connection with these affairs or knowledge about
them is taken as a sign of guilt or of folly, and he
must be prepared to carry the weight of a century
of disillusionment and the indictments of an Eco-
nomic interpretation 7 of history.

Hence, however stable the goods which our re-
ligion has to offer, it has a new case to present, a
new pledge to give, a new mode of offering what
is eternally true. I am not making any plea for the
justice of the present temper of the new oriental
lands; there is much in it which will not last, it
is full of illusion. It is not that the questions now
put to Christianity by the Orient are deeper or
more searching than any other questions have ever
been; it is simply that these are in fact the new

19

attitudes, presuppositions, doubts, with which we
have to contend.

Christianity itself if it is the truth we can live
by must be always ahead of the 'newest' thought.
In its own nature, it is prepared to catch the soul
of Asia, and of America, at its next turn, and at
each future turn, having been there long in ad-
vance. But it requires everlasting nimbleness on
our part to be there with it!

Now an equally obvious word to those who fear
continuity and who distrust the idea that truth can
be identical from one age to another.

Some of you feel that religion, since it has a
living function to fulfill in a living social body,
must be continually reborn, as that body is re-
born. An eighteenth century heart cannot function
in a twentieth century body, still less a first cen-
tury heart. Hence you appeal for a resolute scrap-
ping of old conceptions, and for launching out on
something called modernity. As a matter of fact,
you point out, religion does move. Has it not been
trending steadily toward humanism, toward social
concern, toward admitting variety of theological
outlook? Then why not be hearty about it, give
these tendencies full sway, cut adrift from the
supernatural, from the stuffy pieties of the private
self, from the impossible ideal of credal unity, and
go in for humanism, science, variety?

20

Here we have the illusion of the reformer. His
slogan is that "all things must become new"} he
feels the course of change so violently that he is in
an incessant revolutionary pother. He fails to see
that on his basis all the thoughts of men are con-
demned to futility, including whatever brand-new
truth may be served up hot from the scientific
griddle today. For on such a plan whatever truth
we get will shortly be rendered untrue by its suc-
cessor} and with that the whole importance of get-
ting truth evaporates. This view wholly misreads
the history of thought. There are novelties and
today they come thick and fast, especially in the
fields of science} but these novelties are never pure
displacements, they are new branches on a slowly
growing stem, which has a permanence of form
and place.

Further, there is no 'trend' in the history of
thought which is uniformly one way. Thought has
its reverses of tack, like a sailing vessel} it recurs
to former positions with better definitions} it al-
ternates positions, moves to new ground, and yet
preserves unaltered a central core of truth of
which it becomes through all changes more clear-
ly conscious. Hence 'trends', whether to human-
ism or to any other form of outlook, are the poor-
est of grounds from which to discern the future.

We can be sure that the truth of Christianity
will show these traits. Our apprehension of it is

21

subject to growth and change ; any formulation we
reach will be a fair target for revision. Yet there
is an enduring essence of which we become slowly
aware, and which draws us together, even while
our definitions tend to split us apart. An exhaus-
tive statement may never be within our reach j but
even now it is possible to indicate some portion of
it which we can together regard as permanent.

22

III. PERMANENT PRACTICAL DEMANDS.

Some of the abiding essence of Christianity is
certainly contained in the four words which were
so often used by Jesus : Repent, Believe, Love,
Enter. These are, in rude outline, the four prac-
tical demands of the gospel.

Repentance. This is the first step out of 'lost-
ness 7 , for it contains an awareness of being lost:
the only hopeless lostness is that of a person whol-
ly contented with a false direction. Repentance is
the state of mind of one who begins to feel that he
has been worshipping a false god, placing some
creature (such as a science) in the place of the Cre-
ator. This sense of inadequacy is the sign of the
working in him of a better vision of truth; he may
not see clearly what this positive thing is, but he is
aware of the negation it arouses, the alienation
from the false good. His repentance is the begin-
ning of a new life. There are many in the present
state of the world who have begun to repent in
this sense, having lost their confidence in the
cheaper, yes, even in the finer goods of civiliza-
tion, so far as these lack the touch of infinitude
which preserves them from mortality.

Believe and Love. These two demands go to-
gether; they are the requirements placed on cog-

. 23

nition and on feeling j they are the positive attach-
ments which the soul must win toward what is
supersensible and realj they are its hold on God.
The call for faith is not merely a demand for
assent to a proposition, it is a demand for recog-
nition of present reality, the concrete presence of
God. It is a leap out of oneself, but a leap into
the realization of self. It is a perception that the
thing which has been working in me to make me
dissatisfied with my former goods, to bring about
my repentance, that thing, the object of my deep-
est longing, is here and with me. I must have the
courage to recognize that what I have wanted to
believe true is true. This deed of courage is faith.
It includes a belief that the world can be changed,
since good rather than evil is its true nature ; it is
this vital courage which is chiefly lacking, at this
moment of history.

And when faith comes, one loses all the reasons
for hatred and alienation and fear of menj the
temper of love enters with the attainment of that
central certainty and repose in the goodness of the
most real. ("We know that we have passed from
death unto life, because we love the brethren"
I John, iii, 14 ; cf. John v, 24).

But there remains the fourth injunction, Enter,
a call not for knowledge nor feeling but for de-
cision and deed. This decision is primarily an in-
dividual and solitary act) but it is an act which

24

involves union in an historical effort with other
men. It is expressed by Jesus in various ways:
Follow me; Take my yoke upon you; Strive to
enter in at the strait gate; Go, work in my vine-
yard; but in all cases there hovers around the
expression this issue, as to whether one does or
does not "Enter the kingdom of heaven". It is a
critical moment in the religious life of an indi-
vidual when he sees its requirement as not mere-
ly being right, thinking right, feeling right, but as
doing right, and as doing one particular right
thing, taking part in a joint effort in history to
bring about a kingdom of God among men. This
conscious demand which specifies an active his-
torical church as an organ of individual religion
marks a difference between Christianity and any
other of the great religions I know of, though all
these religions have been missionary in their spirit
and activity.

These demands are ancient demands; but we do
not outgrow them. They are still the kernel of the
gospel in its requirements, and in its promise or
assurance that he who complies with them "hath
everlasting life", has the germ of eternity in him
even now.

And we may remark in passing that they differ
in two important points from the "common faith"
which Professor JDewey has so powerfully recom-
mended to our generation. Dewey has seen, as
few naturalists have seen, the reality of religious

25

experience, and the element of rebirth or conver-
sion which it involves. It implies, as he sees, a
surrender of one's self to the wholehearted effort
to realize ideal values, in the assurance that there
is something in the nature of things which makes
this effort a reasonable and hopeful one. The gos-
pel says all this 5 but it adds two things which
Dewey tries to keep out of the picture, first, that
this 'something in the nature of things'^ the super-
natural being, capable of solicitude for men, whom
men have called God. Second, that this religious
experience which is religiousness-in-general shall
become a particular historical effort. Religion
shall become c a' religion (and every good prag-
matist should join in this demand, for on Dewey's
principles it is not generalities that do work in the
world, but concrete entities). Religiousness apart
from 'a' religion remains a eunuch in the spiritual
generations of history. It is this fourth demand of
the gospel which constitutes of religious truth a
church, dedicated to the task of realizing, not
sporadic "ideal values," but a kingdom of God in
history. It is through the religious organization
that the wills of men, sharpened to self-surrender
by the new vision of life, flow together into the
very concrete though infinite enterprise of the sal-
vation of the world.

If any change should break the minds of men
away from these conceptions of the gospel, and

26

from this historic task, it would ipso facto break
them away from Christianity itself. The force of
modern conditions whether upon the church or
upon the mission can only be to deepen our
realization of these eternal elements of the faith.

27

IV. Is THERE A MODERN EVANGELISM?

In what sense, then, is there a 'modern' evan-
gelism? I answer, in precisely the sense in which
the preaching of Jesus was modern in its own
time, namely in its relevance to the problems which
then and there were facing the souls of men; in its
definite naming and rejection of those inadequate
or perverse answers which at that time gave him
the picture of the "blind leading the blind". His
preaching was universal, and yet definitely timely.

For example, civilization for upward of five
hundred years had been pulling away from local-
ism, and trying for the political form of a world-
empire. Political conceptions had reached out
toward something universally human in the Roman
type of justice with local pacification. The political
order was prepared to tolerate local religious be-
lief and practice when it was not too serious: it was
obliged to tolerate this localism because religious
thought had not kept pace with the scope of em-
pire. It had realized that the hereditary national
cults were no longer adequate} citizenship had
broken away from tribal religious fraternity, and
citizenship was no solution for the problems of the
soul. This was the peculiar lostness of the Greco-
Roman world. Religion had to become world-

28

religion j and it had to reach this goal, not by
identifying itself with the political totality (the
false hope of the Empire), but by reaching the in-
dividual soul at a level deeper than his citizenship,
deeper than his race, deeper than his religious
tradition, deeper than the fraternity of the phil-
osophical Stoic. In such problems as these was the
"preparation for the gospel": Jesus and Paul
were speaking to questions which five hundred
years of human history had been preparing. They
spoke in the 'ripeness of time'. "Neither at this
mountain nor in Jerusalem", was an utterance of
universal truth j but it was a word spoken to the
personal dilemma of a Samaritan woman of the
first century. And spoken earlier or later in the
history of mankind, it could hardly have had its
immense liberating value.

Now if our own preaching is to have the same
kind of relevance, it must show the same sensitive
and profound appreciation of the questions which
our last five hundred years of history have been
preparing for us. Let me illustrate how this re-
quirement of relevance might be transposed to our
own time.

Our times are tremendously puzzled by the
place which 'pugnacity has or ought to have in
civilized life. Christianity has something to say
on that point. What has it to say?

29

Our first answer is likely to be: Christianity does
away with pugnacity; it teaches a gospel of love,
forgiveness, patience, peace, non-resistance. Is this
the whole gospel on that subject? And if so, are
the Marxian critics of religion right when they say
that it makes men sheep before their shearers, the
exploiters of the world? Is there nothing in Chris-
tianity to spur men to resist injustice, and to fight
for the establishment of a decent economy and
politics?

Let me tell you a story of a great negro edu-
cator, who long ago in his student days turned up
in a class in metaphysics at Harvard College. I
had noticed this boy: he had taken a good part in
our discussions. I had noticed that he was dark,
but I didn't know that he was a negro. One day he
stayed after class and said, "May I have a per-
sonal word with you?" He began his story by say-
ing, "I am a negro j" and then he said, "I have a
personal decision to make. I have been offered a
position by the American Association for the Ad-
vancement of Colored People, but I have been
planning to be a minister. As a minister of the
Gospel I should be associated with people many of
whom are uneducated. If I take this job I shall
be associated mostly with college men. If I be-
come a minister, I shall have to exhort my people
to patience, forebearance, foregiveness. If I join
the Association, my mind will be full from morn-
ing to night of the grievances of my people, and I

30

shall be exhorting them to resent their wrongs and
to stand up for their rights. Now -my people need
both of these things"

I have often recalled those penetrating words of
his "My people need both of these things," and
have wondered whether religion is doomed to deal
only with one of them, that is, with half-truths. If
we Christians preach exclusively love and patience
and long-suffering j if we praise the attitude of
resignation in this world which leads men to put
their hope in a heavenly restitution and to be pas-
sive in face of wrong j if we persuade them that
suffering is an end in itself and a means of grace
to the human spirit, are we admitting that Marx
was right, that our religion is an opiate for the
masses? I say, a thousand times No! That is not
what Christianity means. But if we don't mean
that, then it is high time to say so. We are certain-
ly to preach love and forgiveness ; but those terms
do not convey all of the Gospel. If we consider
history, we find that Christianity is the one reli-
gion under which men have fought for the rights
of others, as well as for their own rights. It is the
one religion under which the law of civil right has
grown strong. It has a structural force which is
not in any other religion of the world. Love is a
key-word in many a religious tradition, but the
love of men demanded by Christianity is a love
devoid of indulgence, capable of severity, contain-

31

ing the salt of a just pugnacity. It contains in solu-
tion all that sternness which Nietzsche justly saw
as necessary to creative power ; and had we been
sufficiently alive to that side of the gospel, much
of the Nietzscheian bluster against Christianity
would have been pointless, and the Marxian cari-
cature of religion as a spineless yielding to wrong,
palpably absurd. The present problems of man-
kind should elicit here a new emphasis in preach-
ing.

But this point leads to another. If Christianity,
as we have just said, believes enough in this world
to put up a fight for justice, does this mean that it
rejects other-worldly interests, and becomes a
purely human and social movement? Is there a
competitive relation between the other-world and
this-world so that we must drop one in order to do
justice to the other? When Christianity spurs us
out of acquiescence in preventable wrong, and de-
mands that the Kingdom of Heaven shall include
a just human order, does it at the same time insist
that the unpreventable sufferings of men shall
have no relief, the great body of evil no solution,
and death no further destiny?

Here, again, a thousand times, No! And if we
say No, we must make clear why we say it. The
clear acceptance of a mundane duty, on the part of
religion, puts a new burden on faith in the super-
mundane. Noble thinkers like the Stoics, like Spin-
oza, like Walter Lippmann in our own time, who

32

urge us to fight the good fight, and for what we
cannot achieve, to cultivate a wise and mature
resignation, put as good a face on human life as
can be put within human limits. Unless Christian-
ity is prepared to accept this resignation as the last
word, for all of us who are not in at the final
triumph, it would do well to reassert its care for
those who die in the fight! Christianity is based
on an affirmation that human life gets its meaning
and dignity, not from itself, but from that which
is beyond humanity. It has something to say about
the universe as a wholej and about the care of the
ultimate power for individuals j and without this
superhuman reference it has nothing unique to
lend to the fight for a better humanity. To live in
the world as a Christian is, in a definite sense, to
'overcome the world' j and the world can be over-
come only from a point outside it which can com-
prehend it as a whole. In becoming more explic-
itly a religion of the social order, Christianity can-
not cease to be an other-worldly religion j the two
sides of its faith do not conflict, but support one
another.

This also is an emphasis which the problems
left by the scientific and humanistic movements of
five hundred years now urgently require of our
preaching.

And the positive, aggressive motive of evangel-
ism, the world over, is the imminent need and the
hope which lies in preaching these things. We are

33

responsible, as the creators of the world-order
now taking shape for better or for worse.

V. EVANGELISM BECOMES COMPOSITE.

In view of these comments, let us now look
briefly at evangelism as it appears in the foreign
mission of today.

The heroes of the Modern Missions Movement
which began a hundred and fifty years ago, men
like William Carey, Judson, Morrison, Living-
stone, were men of great stature. Their vision
included the saving of individual souls and also
the renovation of societies. Because of the magni-
tude of their purposes and all such enterprises
have a way of growing in geometrical ratio the
work of one man naturally became the work of
many men. The modern mission Board is a neces-
sary consequence. Some such permanent directing
body and source of supply was required if unity
and continuity of purpose were to be maintained
among these many heads. The original mission-
aries had undertaken more than they knew, any
good man undertakes more than he knows, to
become 'involved' is one of the laws of all vitality.
The mission Boards have preserved what other-
wise would be sporadic and brilliant threads of
human effort, sinking easily into the sands and
disappearing. The Boards have saved from futil-
ity the work of the great heroes.

35

Now a new turn has appeared in the history of
the modern mission a turn which has been ap-
parent since 1921 to all closely engaged in the
.task. The meaning of that turn we are still occu-
pied in interpreting} but part of it is certainly this,
that the problems of the mission are strongly felt
by the church to be an integral part of the prob-
lems of the church at home, and also, an integral
part of the entire impact of people upon people
and of culture upon culture. The mission enter-
prise appears to the church less autonomous, less
separable than before.

If this impression is true, then, like the original
founders, the Boards also have become involved in
more than they knew 5 and the problem is to save,
by discerning its normal relationships, the work
which they have in a century of labor so bravely
developed. This work must be saved from scat-
tering, from division, from internal conflict. It
must be saved from misdirection, from what Pro-
fessor Richter, the great missionary leader of
Germany, calls "the frittering of noble energies".
It must be saved from the dangers which attend
all system and technical proficiency, from petty
industriousness and the meretricious consolations
of statistical results. It must be saved from dead-
ly financial anxiety, and the consequent intrusion
on primary aims of the secondary aim of self-
preservation. It must be saved from the retreats

36

which attend over-expansion, and the shallowness
which attends hurry and eagerness for numbers.
It must be saved from being drowned out in the
flood of counter-preaching by the other messengers
of our civilization. It must be saved from the
wastes of building local spiritual communities with
great pains, in the path of revolution and other
spiritual lava-flows and avalanches. And chiefly, it
must be saved from the threat of irrelevance, as
the world swings through that curve which makes
all questions at once questions of the inner life, of
the national life, and of world-culture?

How can this work be saved? Only by being en-
veloped by the thought and activity of the whole
church, as the activity of the Boards enveloped the
work of the individual missionary. Evangelism is
incomplete until the whole body of the energy of
the church is brought into the proper task of the
church, the salvation of the world. Evangelism
must become in a new sense a composite under-
taking, a single voice which is a union of many
voices.

In one sense it has always been composite: in the
sense, namely, that the voice of the preacher has
been joined with his deeds and his life in the im-
pact of his preaching. There has never been a work
of preaching which had not a body as well as a
soul: there has never been a good missionary who
did not do other things than preaching as a 'part of

37

his 'preaching. I am thinking at the moment of
the picture of Paul and Silas in prison, on that
memorable night when the earthquake came and
broke the prison walls and the chains, and the poor
jailer was about to commit suicide, expecting that
all these prisoners of his would have escaped.
These prisoners had been singing at midnight;
they had had a hard day of it; they had been
beaten, and how they were in a mood for singing
is hard to tell, but they were. And then Paul
spoke to the jailer and said, "Do thyself no harm:
we are all here." It was not verbal preaching that
turned the jailer around, it was this unexpected
motivation; it was something in the conduct of
these men who refrained from running away, as
any ordinary prisoner would have done. They had
something which produced a different pattern of
behavior. That is what turned him around; that
is what led him to ask "What shall I do to be
saved? Whatever you have, that is what I want".
By their deeds and their strange joy, his mind was
prepared for the word which followed, the word
which must always be ready to assign meaning to
the action. This order of events is typical of all
sound evangelism, which has always been a com-
posite of deeds and words, a temper visible in be-
havior which leads people to say "I want what you
have, whatever it is."

This is the ancient and enduring compositeness
of preaching. But now, evangelism has become

38

composite in other senses. With the voice o the
preacher there mingle inescapably other voices j
for with the rapid growth of knowledge of our
civilization on the part of his hearers, he stands
as representing it, consciously or unconsciously,
willingly or unwillingly. He is a part of the speech
of civilization to civilization.

It goes without saying that this marginal and
silent supplement of his preaching will sometimes
aid, and sometimes confuse or cancel his impres-
sion. I am not thinking merely of the message of
our science and technique, eagerly sought} nor of
the spirit of our customs and laws, our family in-
stitutions, our politics} nor of the language of our
art and architecture, our amusements and travels,
our literature and philosophy, the play of our free
thought and feeling. Still less am I thinking of
the rumors of our crimes, greeds, vulgarities} or
of the direct impact of our foreign deeds in com-
merce, diplomacy, war and peace. I am thinking
of the question behind all this, what does it reveal
about the gods we really worship? Has the Christ
convinced and drawn to himself the vital and as-
piring forces in what we call our civilization?
What is evil, wilful and perverse in us, the mis-
sionary can denounce and to some extent disown}
but from those things in our culture which attract
his hearers he cannot detach his message, as if to
say, "these things are all right in their way, but
religion is something quite different", without

39

losing their interest and confessing an unsolved
relationship. His evangelism must today be com-
posite with the silent evangelism of all the best
elements of our cultural existence. He must know
his own in this wide field.

But chiefly (and in part because of this), evan-
gelism has become composite in the further respect
that all of the church is now called upon to take
a conscious and thoughtful part in it. Here we
return to the point from which we started, that the
obligation to preach rests on the whole church.

In what way can this obligation be carried out?

The contribution of money is necessary, but not
sufficient. With it must go a contribution of intel-
ligent, appreciative, selective criticism, based on
the kind of knowledge men want of enterprises in
which they are vitally concerned, not de'ad facts,
not the comments of alien 'experts', not the back-
patting of the professional encourager, but the
stern and faithful judgment of a creative Christian
outlook. This is a function so important, and so
difficult, that its mounting will require much con-
sideration j but its benefits will extend to all who
give counsel as well as to those who receive it.

But beyond this, there is something even more
significant, which must come from the body of the
church. It is the contribution of a constructive
supplementary imagination, conceiving new ways

40

in which the spirit of Christ can be made a working
.factor in human life. For jorms of mission work
are transitory; the idea of the mission is far wider
than any type we have devised. There have been
long lapses in mission history, during which old
types have died and the new type was not born.
The mission of the future should be making its
initial stages while the present type is still in its
strength.

As an instance of what I mean, let me mention a
vacant place in the activities of our Protestant mis-
sions which has become, during these recent years,
a truly serious omission, just because of the mixed
currents of change in Oriental life which are vital-
ly affecting the pertinence of what we are doing
there. It is the activity of the reflective observer,
qualified by a deep knowledge of the spiritual
backgrounds of the life about him, and whose main
business is not building institutions, but developing
understanding. There ought to be here and there,
as it were, watch-towers of thought from which
the directions of change can be observed and sug-
gestions sent out to the churches and to the
workers in the field.

This proposal is enforced by the fact that the
Roman Catholic missions carry out this activity in-
cidentally but effectively, in ways which we may
profitably consider. Near Darjeeling there is an
institution, St. Mary's finishing school for Jesuit

41

missionaries. Our commission was invited to visit
it, and some of us did so. We were told something
about how these Jesuits go into their training and
their work. It is an amazing thing. These young
fellows after perhaps two years of college study
go, on their arrival in India, for four years to an
institution in the south where they receive their
"philosophical training". Here they learn some-
thing of the sciences and also of the languages and
religions of India. Then for three years they come
out as apprentices in the Jesuit missions, or make
their own studies among the people. One of these
young Jesuits told me he had put his knapsack on
his back and gone along the Indian road, eating,
drinking, and living with villagers, incidentally
taking their diseases, and fortunately coming
through with a robust constitution, knowing Indian
life somewhat intimately. Then come three or
four other years, the "theological training", in St.
Mary's. More study of the background of India,
the religions, the languages, philosophies. In their
marvelous library there were books listed in the
Index Expurgatoriusj they had some of my books
there! When we got back from the tour of in-
spection, I overheard the Father Superior saying
to my wife, "We have some of your husband's
books here 5 we call them our bad books!" The
bad books of the Index were being read; as mature
students they allowed themselves that liberty. (By
the way, that might be a good suggestion for deal-

A2

ing with "Re-thinking Missions": putting it
among the bad books, yet allowing the sturdy to
look into it!) But there they were, these men,
getting into the thought of the world and then
coming out ready to be missionaires. Whenever
you meet a Jesuit in Asia, you meet a man of cul-
ture, a man who has taken time to know the deep-
er phases of the life around him, a man of broad
sympathy. Now, what does this mean? They
don't get through with their studies as a rule until
they are in their early thirties j but I think of them
as a group of deeply trained spirits, poised there
on the heights of the Himalayas, reflecting on the
problems of mankind, a kind of wings over Asia,
quiet, unhurried, with a firm vision and a depth of
sympathy, putting the strength of their insight at
the service of the entire work of the old church.

Now, friends, we haven't anything like that.
We have our institutions for the speedy training
of missionaries and native preachers. We have
none for this thorough, long-prepared adept re-
flection on the human scene. We think we cannot
afford it, either in money or in time or in person-
nel. My judgment is, we cannot afford not to
have them, some such watch-towers of thought,
devised in the genius of our Protestant societies.
For I believe that whatever notable achievements
lie before the missions of the future will be the re-
ward of depth rather than extent of effort.

43

Haste will not speed the arrival} for haste and
much business destroy that labor of thought which
is the prayer of the church for the saving of the
world. It is hard for us, perhaps especially hard
for Americans, to make the distinction between
urgency and anxiety, an anxiety which brings with
it a pressure for speed and numbers. Let us re-
member one further characteristic of the preach-
ing of Jesus, its patience. How soon he expected
the end of the world to come, we shall never
know. Many of his parables reveal a long vista
of the slow growth of the Kingdom from the grain
of mustard seed onward. He conceived of a slow
leavening process in which his followers would, in
hidden ways, cure the vast lump of human life.
The lostness of men was about him, as it is about
us} yet the gospel he preached was an unhurried
gospelj it had the note of infinite urgency without
being breathless} it was not animated by panic,
because it had its central certainty of the outcome
in God's hands. Perhaps his last word was ad-
dressed to that sense of anxious haste which he
foresaw would overtake souls of lesser faith, for it
opens a long vista for a like patience on our part,
"Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of
the world!"

44

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